With the England job gone to Roy Hodgson, Gary Neville running rings round his son on telly and the dread call of the Europa League singing to Spurs, Harry Redknapp's mind has turned to dark thoughts. Where once he saw an unbeatable champion in goal for Spurs he sees a man being creaking under the frosts of time, and will pack Brad Friedel off to the retirement home and bring in Birmingham City's Ben Foster.

Another manager facing up to reality is Kenny Dalglish. The Henry regime has realised that if you're going to make a policy of buying super-value bargains, it's probably best if you don't fork our tens of millions of pounds for them and to that end the Mirror reckons Liverpool will be looking for free agents this summer.

Chelsea are big fans of Free Agents, the short-lived but excellent sitcom starring Stephen Mangan, but aren't really into free agents. Instead they like forking out ludicrous sums on hot exciting European talent. For that reason they'll splash £16m on Partizan Belgrade's 18-year-old attacking midfielder Lazar Markovic. Liverpool are also interested, slightly undermining the Mill's point about their lowered transfer budget.

According to TalkSport, Gregory van der Wiel's "advanced talks" – about string theory and carbon capture – with Valencia have broken down and Chelsea will now duke it out with Real Madrid and Roma for the Ajax full-back's signature.

Paul Pogba will leave Manchester United for Juventus on 1 July and there's nothing anyone can do about it, says the Daily Mail.

Arsène Wenger, master of buying players who sound quite good until they get to the Premier League and then turn out to be average to 4% below average, is tracking Borussia Dortmund's Japan midfielder Shinji Kagawa. He'd cost £7m because his contract expires next summer.

If you were in charge of Manchester United, Chelsea or Manchester City and had £10m kicking around the place – which is likely – you'd spend it on the Fulham midfielder Moussa Dembélé. Or so goal.com would have us believe.

Hugo Rodallega, exiled from the Wigan first team for not being good anymore and sat in his greenbelt mansion, is tired of watching the pointing hands of country people, not knowing their tongue, and will leave the care of Roberto Martínez any day now. "I don't know if he has another club lined up but he will go with our blessing," said Martínez, sprinkling holy water, incense and some four-leafed clover over Rodallega's head.